It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.

Name	John Stuart Mill
Life	1806 - 1873
Country	England
Category	Wisdom
Wikipedia	>>

The full text of this quote from Mill's book on Utilitarianism adds: "And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides." This is slightly surprising. Can it really be that Mill, this "God of liberalism," is elitist enough to compare a human being to a pig? You might suspect it, especially as he also shows open contempt for "the common herd, including the herd of writers, not only in newspapers and periodicals, but in books of weight and pretension..." He seems to share Machiavelli's opinion that "in the world there is nothing but the mob". Mill makes two distinctions. One, made before cloning, is between Socrates and a pig. The other between satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Go back to what Socrates said: "There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance." He well knew the Delphic phrase: knowledge about yourself. Mill said many things worth quoting. For instance, if you "ask yourself whether you are happy, you cease to be so." We have mentioned two studies suggesting this may be true. Eighty percent of the feeling of happiness seems to be biologically innate, p. 00. No use asking questions; it just is necessarily so! And material contentment in man as in mouse, p. 00, seems to be a relative thing, catching us in an arms race for satisfaction that will never end. Pigs, however, and some fools, who have eaten enough and copulated enough, are satisfied. They harbor no higher ambitions to gain knowledge, not even of themselves. Is it much different in a so-called civilization where everything turns around the Golden Calf? The excellent journal, the New

Yorker - able to give you a weekly shot of laughter - showed a cartoon in which two angels nervously observed our Lord, who was looking down on our planet with a highly dissatisfied posture. "It has yet to turn a profit", one angel whispered to the other. There may not be any solutions to the world's problems. The struggle between good and evil is bound to continue without an end. That is, at least, the conclusion of one of our deepest scholars of evil, Norman Cohn. If that is so, it also follows that there is no limit to the knowledge we need in order to avoid the biggest misfortunes in the future. Knowledge is like a little round point. Our knowledge about what we don't know is like a centimeter outside of the point's circular periphery. The bigger our point of knowledge, the bigger yet becomes our circle of known ignorance, outside of which we then have an ignorance that we don't even know about! Thus, serious men and women, unlike pigs or fools, never are satisfied with material advance alone. They will always strive for more then they already have, but only of knowledge. The latest, most serious attempt to understand ourselves is the Human Genome Project, explaining our genetic building blocks, (see p. 00). It complicates Mill's destinction between man and pig because now we can clone pigs, to which we with genetic ingenuity have given our own individual human immune system. In the future all of us will have a "spare-part-pig" at home. When our organs are hurt in traffic accidents or start getting old, we will be able to replace all of them with "xenotransplantations" and organs from our own little pig. With the exception, hopefully, for the human brain and its desire for Socrates' one and only good, knowledge.